At the Graham & Co motel, outside the riverside town of Phoenicia, New York State, there’s a T-shirt for sale behind the reception desk. In black capitals on white cotton, it says: “Catskills vs Hamptons.” The fact that a hotel is flogging its own fashionwear tells you something. The fact that it’s pitching its own little section of the AppalachianMountains as a rival to the Hamptons, the holiday resort of choice for well-to-do New York City dwellers, confirms it: the Catskills are getting cool.
Think of the Catskills as New York’s Cotswolds. The hills may be higher, the rivers faster, the winter skiing better and the dry-stone walls fewer, but essentially this is pretty countryside within easy weekending distance of the city. And, like the Cotswolds, it has some big houses, some of which are owned by famous people. In the middle of the last century, this was the “Borscht Belt”, where New York Jewscame on their summer hols, and in whose resort theatres Woody Allen, Lenny Bruce, Mel Brooks and Joan Riversplayed for laughs.
Today, Yoko Ono owns a farm in the Catskills. David Bowie owns a whole mountain. (He would.) Moby has been spotted down at the local animal sanctuary, which is, it must be said, cooler than bumping into Jeremy Clarkson in a gastropub near Chipping Norton.
Luckily, most of the Catskills haven’t realised they’re cool yet. Either that or they just don’t really care.
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I visited last summer, hiring a car from JFK airport and following a route that took me through the Bronx and over the George Washington Bridge, where two splendid things happened. First, the view of Manhattan out of my driver’s side window — rising up, in the distance, on the east bank of the Hudson. By itself, it was almost reason enough to make this trip. Second, the city that moments before I’d been nervously steering through — a city as mad and massive as New York — just sort of... dissolved. I’d been expecting suburbs and roadside malls. Instead I got the 9Whighway and what felt instantly like countryside.
It’s just 2½ hours to Phoenicia, where your initial reaction on arriving will probably be: “Is this it?” It’s essentially a one-street town, with few outward clues that this could be a hipster Valhalla. But open your car door and you’ll find the air cool and clean. You can see sky and hear birds. Everyone here, locals included, seems to be on holiday.
Phoenicia’s Main Street may be short, but it adds up to a “best of” of American life. There’s a German deli. There’s an ice-cream parlour. There’s a drugstore. There are coffee shops that are good for brunch (Sweet Sue’s, Mama’s Boy). There’s a sensational vintage/junk shop, Mystery Spot (mysteryspotvintage.com), where prices are a fraction of what they would be in Brooklyn — which might explain the chap in vest and denim shorts with the leg tattoos, as well as the other temporary evacuees from NYC’s hipster borough, sitting in the sunshine outside Sportsman’s, the town’s no-nonsense pub: beer, tacos, pizza, burgers (from £6; alamocantina.com). In one front yard, there were actual kids selling actual homemade lemonade for 50 cents a cup. I could have wept tears of pure down-home Americana.
For the full escape from the trappings of the city, Phoenicia has its own campsite, right on the river (from £23 a night; phoeniciacampground.com). You can hire a giant rubber ring and spend all day messing about on Esopus Creek, doing an activity called tubing (£30 for the day; towntinker.com ). For fishing supplies, and to stock up on plaid, call in at Morne Imports, affectionately known as Too Dark Store due to its limited lighting conditions.
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More rugged outdoorsmen and women might trek to Kaaterskill waterfalls. My rural explorations were via the steep but straightforward 1½-hour hike up Mount Tremper. At its 2,740ft summit is a multistorey fire lookout tower, abandoned in the 1970s, which you should climb. The view was of green slopes all around; I couldn’t see a road or another soul. Though the Catskills are, relatively speaking, a minor and benign section of America’s epic landscape, they rather put the Cotswolds’ rolling hummocks to shame.
My Saturday-morning stroll had been fuelled by breakfast at the Phoenicia Diner, which is where things take a turn towards the calculated and cool. Here, a 1960s diner has been given a stylish up-do, with period chrome, laminate wood and menu sheets printed in a funky typeface. It’s more destination restaurant than truck stop. That said, the mountain views across Route 28 are rather lovely, and they do wonderful things with eggs in skillets (from £6; phoeniciadiner.com).
If the diner offers suspicious undertones of hipsterdom, then the Graham & Co motel is a full-on assault. If you’ve stayed at an Ace hotel, you’ll know the drill: old building stripped back to its stylish essentials, with the odd bit of covetable furniture thrown in. It has a pool, volleyball and outdoor film screenings. The city sorts love it: it was booked out for the whole of last summer (doubles from £88; thegrahamandco.com).
Don’t worry too much if you can’t get a room, though, because it means you can stay, like I did, with New Zealander Tom and his artist partner, Dana, at the Phoenicia Belle, their clapboard Victorian B&B. It’s not trendy. It’s chintzyand welcoming and cheaper — and, crucially, opposite the pub (doubles from £65; phoeniciabelle.com).
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I have a favourite episode from my short stay in the Catskills. It begins in a Swedish furniture store and ends at the house of the art critic of The New Yorker magazine, which sounds criminally pretentious, but it encapsulated the warm-hearted spirit of these mountains.
I didn’t buy anything at Scandinavian Grace, in the town of Shokan, except a cup of coffee and a slice of spice cake, but its owner, Fred Larsson — an escapee from Sweden, then Brooklyn — suggested that, if I was free that night, and since it was July 4 weekend, I should rock up to the house of Peter Schjeldahl, because, as well as an art critic, he’s somewhat of a pyromaniac. Every year, the 72-year-old throws a bonkers fireworks party. “You’ve just got to bring a dish,” Fred said.
So I did. I’m not going to tell you where Peter lives, but if you ask around and they like you, they’ll tell you. Or just look for the mile-long line of double-parked cars outside. There must have been a thousand people in the garden, sitting on blankets with beers and barbecue burgers, their kids splashing around in his lake as they waited for sunset. I placed my supermarket-bought box of cookies in the dedicated dessert tent and grabbed a spot on the slope.
The firework display was loud, dangerously up-close and 20 minutes long. It must have cost Peter a bomb. It was a treat, greeted with rapturous applause after the final bang. There were no poseurs, no drunks, no chancers. I was secretly hoping for Bowie, but no such luck. It was just polite people having a community-spirited nice time. It was hard to believe that the madness of Manhattan and the try-hards of Brooklyn were a matter of hours away.
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Airlines flying to New York include Norwegian, American Airlines, Delta, Virgin Atlantic and British Airways; from £406. Car hire starts at about £30 a day at skyscanner.net/carhire